Here is my 2 cents.
Buy a 4 bed/2 bath and get 3 roommates to make it work. Make sure there are no city restrictions on having 4 non-related people living in one house. Because you are looking for roommates, you have a different set of rules for housing discrimination. I would target young professionals that spend most of their time at work.
I would like you to demonstrate that you have some grit. For that reason, I agree with the other posters that you should wait until you have enough for 20% down. If you take a 2nd job or get a side hustle, you should be able to come up with the money in 12-18 months. Pay the minimum on your student loans during this time (if you have them)
You are 24 and your hustle should be an asset at this point in your life. I'm not that worried about 20% down as financial security, but more as showing that you have some guts.
No one knows when we are at the top of the market, including myself. You buy when it makes sense for you. I was living in San Diego in 2004-2006 while completing an MA program. In 2006, I was applying to Ph.D. programs. I could have stayed in Southern California, but I wanted to buy a house and get roommates to pay the mortgage. In Southern California, this would have been a stretch.
Instead, I made a conscious decision to move to Fort Collins, CO in 2006 and bought a house in May 2007. Fort Collins real estate was pretty flat from 2002 to 2006 in comparison to the rest of the country. I was not trying to time the market. I was just trying to find something that made sense for me. I bought for 182K and made 10K of repairs. Original mortgage was $1,050. I did a re-fi in 2009 and lowered it to $950. I rented 3 rooms at $350 each. These numbers are not sexy, but good enough to make it work on your first deal and learn how to be a landlord.
Walt considers this success to be dumb luck. I think it was more of a conscious decision to put myself in the best position to be successful. If I bought in Southern California in 2004-2006 and somehow made it through the storm, I think that would have been dumb luck.
I also put a premium on location, which can sometimes make your rental numbers look worse. I bought a house 1/2 mile away from Colorado State University. I could have gotten slightly better initial numbers by buying something 2 miles away from campus. However, renting rooms would have been more difficult with less demand being farther away from campus.
In 2017, I was on the MMM forum looking for ideas on how to boost my net worth with real estate. I got mostly negative feedback stating that all real estate is at an all time high. Despite the lack of encouragement, I purchased a foreclosure in Hawaii on the island of Kauai for 603K in June 2018. I made 50K worth of repairs and it is now worth about 800K. The deal went well, but the important part is that I had enough reserves even if the deal did not go well. If I tried to do something like this on my first deal, it would have been a bad idea.
In the end, the answer is "it depends"